Mak Siu-han finished her set at the Catwalk disco in the New World Hotel and got home to Tuen Mun at about five in the morning on April 14, 1993. She was twenty-two, a disc jockey, and she lived in Hing Shing House on the Tai Hing estate. At a quarter to eight she was found dead on the stairs between the fifth and sixth floors of her building, sexually assaulted. Police later estimated that as many as forty people had stepped past her body on their way out to work before anyone reported it. The next night more than two hundred residents marched through Tuen Mun to protest the way their town was being policed.
She was the second woman strangled by the man the Chinese-language papers called Sik Moh, the Sex Devil, and the English-language papers the Tuen Mun rapist. The first had been Li Hing, fifty, a sales assistant at a Yaohan department store, who was coming home from a mahjong game at four in the morning when a young man followed her into the elevator of her block on the Yau Oi estate. He strangled her and then raped her. Up to twenty people are said to have walked past her before her death was reported. The sources do not agree on when she died. The standard English-language account places her murder after a run of six rapes in 1992; the South China Morning Post's report of the verdict put all three killings between February and May 1993.
The rapes had begun on April 24, 1992, when he followed a nineteen-year-old from her taxi into the elevator of Oi Ming House. Two months later he followed a thirty-two-year-old waitress home from Club Versailles in Wan Chai at half past four in the morning. Two months after that it was a woman of thirty-nine at four a.m., then a woman of thirty-two he followed into the elevator of Hing Ping House at half past eleven at night, then another woman of thirty-two, and twenty-five days later a woman of twenty-eight who spent three days in the hospital. Rape was reported in Tuen Mun at about twice the rate of the rest of Hong Kong, and a single attack drew little notice. It was the regularity that frightened people.
Tuen Mun had been laid out on a government drawing board in the late 1970s as a self-contained satellite town in the New Territories for four hundred and eighty thousand people. When the factories moved across the border to cheaper labor, its residents were left commuting for hours into Kowloon and Hong Kong Island for work. A reporter who covered the case described concrete towers under sodium light, stunted trees and broken playgrounds, truancy and juvenile crime among the highest in the territory, the Sun Yee On triad running the building sites, the loan-sharking and the recruiting in the schoolyards, and the worst rate of child abuse in Hong Kong.
Lam Kwok-wai grew up there. He was born on January 27, 1971, and raised with his father, his stepmother and four siblings in a 450-square-foot apartment in Tai Hing House, a few minutes from where Mak Siu-han would die. His mother had left when he was three to live with another man. He was a truant and a poor student, quit school for good at fifteen, and served two months in a detention center the same year. After eighteen, by his own later account, he tried every drug he could find, drank every day, and took up illegal road racing. By the time of his trial he was working as a decorator. He still lived at home.
That last fact kept him out of the investigation. In 1992 Tuen Mun recorded seven murders and sixteen reported rapes, and the police brought in MIIDASS, the Major Incident Investigation and Disaster Support System, the computer indexing system that had been used in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Every man in the district convicted of wife beating, assault or sexual assault was checked. Lam had no record of sexual offenses and was never on the list. After the Mak killing and the protest march, he decided that "the heat was too much" and moved in with an older sister in Hung Hom, across the harbor in Kowloon. On July 11, 1993, Lau Sui-man, twenty-three, who worked as a public relations hostess at a karaoke lounge, was strangled there. Her name also appears in some sources as Lau Siu-man.
He was caught because of a conversation. At about half past one in the morning on August 8, 1993, by the most detailed account, he attacked and raped a twenty-one-year-old woman in Mei King Street, Hung Hom. During the attack he began to talk to her. They shared a cigarette, he asked her to be his girlfriend, and they agreed to meet the next evening at the UA Whampoa cinema. When she got home and told her mother-in-law, she was told to forget it. The next afternoon she told her brother, an officer in the Correctional Services Department, and he took her to the police. Officers staked out the cinema, but by this account they were not watching when Lam arrived, and it was her brother who tackled him. The South China Morning Post later summarized it as a bogus date arranged by his last victim, who then called the police. The dates in the record do not line up: this account puts the arrest on August 9, a criminological case study gives Friday, August 6, and the Court of Appeal described the attacks as ending on August 5.
He killed with his hands, and he had a name for the right one. He called it his "fork." In court he spent long stretches staring at it, stroking the line of his thumb and forefinger as though it did not belong to him. At the Siu Lam psychiatric center, where he was held for assessment, he put it to his own throat and squeezed, and let go when he lost consciousness.
The indictment carried eighteen counts, seven of robbery, eight of rape and three of murder, arising from ten attacks on women in Tuen Mun and Hung Hom. The figure of ten rapes that circulates in later accounts is the number of attacks, not the number of rape counts. Lam pleaded guilty to the rapes and robberies. To the killings he offered pleas of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility, and the Crown refused them. The murder trial before Mr. Justice Bewley in the High Court lasted four days in September 1994, and the jury of six men and one woman rejected the defense. The Post's headline on the verdict was that Lam was bad, not mad. He was twenty-three, and he showed no emotion when the verdicts were read.
The judge imposed the mandatory life sentence on each murder count and adjourned sentencing on the rapes and robberies. At the second hearing Lam apologized to his victims and their families. Bewley told the court the case was one of the worst ever to come before it, and passed further life terms. The total came to eleven life sentences.
On appeal the defense leaned on the evidence of a psychiatrist, Dr. Connell, who had testified that Lam met the criteria for diminished responsibility: a long, consistent pattern of irresponsibility, made worse by heavy drinking, that left him struggling to control his impulses and his aggression. Lam also argued that Bewley's remarks had turned the jury against him. The Court of Appeal, sitting as acting Chief Justice Power with Justices of Appeal Bokhary and Ching, took less than an hour to reject the application in August 1995 and held that the judge's comments had been fully justified.
A Hong Kong film based on the case, Tun Men se mo, released in English as The Rapist, came out in 1994, before the appeal was heard. Lam Kwok-wai is usually counted, with Lam Kor-wan, as one of Hong Kong's two known serial killers. The men are unrelated, and the shared surname has caused their cases to be confused.